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California jury says Bayer must pay $2B to couple in Roundup cancer trial
- mzs 7y agodetailed coverage https://www.courthousenews.com/jury-awards-couple-1-billion-in-roundup-cancer-case/ https://www.courthousenews.com/jury-awards-couple-1-billion-... https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1128049228977143811 https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/11280492289771438...
- godzillabrennus 7y agoBayer doesn’t seem to have won the lotto buying Monsanto. I wonder if the CEO will get a golden parachute for this one?
- Alex3917 7y agoAll of the liability was well known before the purchase though.
- jlmorton 7y agoI'm not sure how well-known it was. Bayer and Mansanto agreed to merge in 2016. The first large jury award in a case claiming RoundUp caused cancer was in August 2018. It's worth noting that RoundUp has been sold and marketed for close to fifty years at this point. It is extremely well understood, extremely well studied, extremely common, but we're only recently seeing a number of successful lawsuits claiming glyphosate is a carcinogen.
- nickpsecurity 7y agoThe public at large had a chance to know they're knee deep in decisions that might cause lawsuits. So, that's probably well-known. Two examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZkDikRLQrw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZkDikRLQrw If anything, I'm only surprised something hasn't happened sooner. And then a bunch more times given the size of their product portfolio.
- notimetorelax 7y agoBayer claimed that they could not do full due diligence because Monsanto was an American company.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoThat's a very surprising claim. How does being an American company stop them from doing full due diligence? Bit if it's true, Bayer shouldn't have bought them.
- ekianjo 7y agoI dont know the details about that but there a long history of bad blood between the US and Bayer so this may have played some part in it.
- OrgNet 7y agoDoesn't everyone know that Monsanto had questionable ethics?
- pergadad 7y agoA very solid and respected company paid a gigantic amount for an ailing, future-less (Monsanto had closed most of its research), and clearly ethically struggling company with thousands of lawsuits against it. Worst corporate decision I've ever seen. I can't explain it other than that the CEO, Board, etc of Bayer have been bribed. There is no way they could have been that incompetent. The pending bankruptcy will be a gigantic loss for German industry and the big winners are the usual venture capitalists that drained Monsanto the years before, and got this huge payout.
- Leader2light 7y agoEven if they are guilty, these numbers are simply insanity. The entire justice system will be undermined because of BS like this. No human on earth is "worth" 1 Billion.
- plink 7y agoCan a legal mind please explain to us laypeople how $! billion (per plaintiff) in punitive damages doesn't belong on the other side of Alice's looking glass. Why not make it $1 Cajilion?
- brianpgordon 7y agoI'm not a legal mind, but these are punitive damages, not compensatory ones. The couple didn't endure $2 billion worth of suffering, but Monsanto did commit $2 billion worth of misconduct.
- mars4rp 7y agoso shouldn't it go to the government instead? if the couple didn't suffer for $2B, why should they get it? they should get enough for their suffering, and the rest should go to government for public health.
- fucking_tragedy 7y agoThis case will pave the way for future class action lawsuits, and perhaps criminal or regulatory cases. If someone is stuck on the fact that the jury awarded a couple of people punitive damages, they're missing the forest for the trees.
- rootusrootus 7y agoWhy would this make someone want to participate in a class action? Seems like it would do the opposite. Who doesn't want to be a billionaire?
- fucking_tragedy 7y agoCourts are less likely to award further punitive damages. Those who doesn't have the resources to go against Monsanto's lawyers would have incentives to participate in a class action lawsuit.
- genericone 7y agoI'm in favor of giant companies being beholden to the citizens of the country that they operate in, but I'm not happy that some random jury's opinion on medicine or science is being touted as any sort of authority on the matter.
- ertyuip 7y ago> I'm not happy that some random jury's opinion on medicine or science is being touted as any sort of authority on the matter. Well you never sat on the jury so you dont know what information was presented to them. Obviously enough data was presented to them to form a conclusion though.
- rndgermandude 7y agoYou're talking about juries from the same nation, even same state, as the jury who was utterly impressed by "if it does not fit, you must acquit!", right? Juries, that suffer from the CSI Effect[1]. Juries that not only are made up of scientific laypersons but judicial laypersons. Juries, that have been shown to fuck up every 1 in 8 criminal cases[2], where the burden of proof is supposed to be a lot higher than in a civil case, such as this one. So, I am not convinced about your use of "obviously". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect [2] https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpapers/2006/IPR-WP-06-05.pdf https://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpa...
- Aeolun 7y agoIf the only thing that happened during a trial was the counsel standing up and saying ‘Dear people of the jury, this man is GUILTY!’ that would be enough data for a jury to form a conclusion. That doesn’t mean the data was any good.
- ende 7y agoYou're grossly overestimating the ability of an innumerate body with insufficient understanding of statistical concepts to be able to interpret data.
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- dzdt 7y agoTrial by jury is so badly equipped to answer complicated questions like does Roundup/glyphosate cause cancer, and did it specifically cause this cancer. Juries are equipped to answer whether a person not so different from the jurors is guilty of a crime not so far removed from the jurors' experience. They are not equipped to resolve factual questions about things like this (or patent cases -- another crazy one we see on HN). Jury == random number generator. Maybe they get it right, but only by chance.
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- rayiner 7y agoThe jury is not answering that question. The jury is just there to evaluate the credibility of the competing experts who have offered opinions on that question. If lay people are not equipped to evaluate such credibility, that calls into question the very underpinnings of our policy-making institutions. Luckily, lay people are qualified to make those judgments. Whenever I have seen an actual jury at work, I have consistently been impressed by the degree to which folks can absorb the information presented at trial. They are far from "random number generators": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2628507/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2628507/ > If this claim is valid, an ideal study would be to compare the judgments of medical doctors to the verdicts rendered by juries. A study by Taragin et al. [31] did just that. The study utilized data from the closed claim files of a medical liability insurer. The insurers had medical doctors closely examine the medical records in cases involving claims of medical negligence to determine if medical negligence had occurred. Tarragin et al. [31] compared these judgments with verdicts rendered by juries if the case went to trial. The jury verdicts tended to be consistent with the medical judgments. Moreover, the study found that verdicts were not related to the severity of the injury suffered by the plaintiff, an indication that juries were not basing their judgment out of mere sympathy for a seriously injured patient. Farber and White [13] also compared jury verdicts to hospital records bearing on negligence. Those authors found that the jury verdicts favored the hospital in all cases that the hospital had rated as not-negligent. The billion-dollar punitive damages verdict, moreover, is not crazy considering that the point of punitive damages is to deter similar conduct in the future. If you look at what folks here on HN--presumably quite knowledgeable about the subject matter--were saying about how much Facebook should be fined to deter conduct like that which led to the Cambridge Analytica issues, the numbers were likewise in the billions of dollars.
- sigzero 7y agoThat's just crazy. Will the judge nullify it?
- throwaway2048 7y agoThe judge decided on it, juries don't decide penalties, only the merit of the evidence presented.
- mzs 7y agoThis was a civil case, so yes the jury does: >After three days of deliberations, the jurors awarded the Pilliods $1 billion each in punitive damages. The jury also awarded Alva Pilliod over $47,000 in past economic damages, $8 million in noneconomic damages and $10 million for future damages. >Jurors handed Alberta Pilliod over $201,000 in past economic damages, $8 million in noneconomic damages and $26 million for future damages. … >… Three jurors disagreed with the $1 billion award for each of the Pilliods, including Olsen. “I thought it was too high,” he said. https://www.courthousenews.com/jury-awards-couple-1-billion-in-roundup-cancer-case/ https://www.courthousenews.com/jury-awards-couple-1-billion-... >It appears to be more specifically about damages calculations. https://twitter.com/MariaDinzeo/status/1127981744127266817 https://twitter.com/MariaDinzeo/status/1127981744127266817
- landryraccoon 7y agoHow do you know? A lawsuit judgement is virtually the only kind of punishment a corporation can suffer. They can’t go to jail, so how do you propose to punish a corporation for wrongdoing?
- krapht 7y agoI'm a little disgusted with these lawsuits. The preponderance of scientific evidence is on the side of Monsanto (gag): Roundup isn't carcinogenic. The one study that is significant to these cases from the IARC has numerous statistical flaws. From the coverage that I've seen, most of these cases have been won on the back of numerous emails and texts from Monsanto trying to delay and suppress the release of potentially negative studies until after their legal cases are resolved. So I guess Monsanto are jerks but also these cases are flawed science.
- tptacek 7y agoGlyphosate isn't carcinogenic. Roundup is more than just glyphosate, though.
- rootusrootus 7y agoI thought the IARC conclusion was that glyphosate was probably carcinogenic? This whole case was built on that, no?
- tptacek 7y agoThe evidence IARC is relying on is extremely thin. I'm not commenting on the case, so much as making the observation that glyphosate can be fine (it most likely is) without the Roundup product itself being safe.
- ionised 7y ago> Glyphosate isn't carcinogenic. Opinion is divided on that assertion. Even Monsanto seems unsure. Why else would they suppress so much unfavourable research and employ all those social media shills?
- rootusrootus 7y agoI don't care much for opinion. Science does not seem too divided on the matter. But humans are emotional creatures, and Monsanto understands that it does not really matter what the science says, it only matters who gets the better media spin. You can bet they are really wishing right now that they had gotten a better handle on the PR.
- pfdietz 7y agoThis will almost certainly get tossed out on appeal.
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- PaulHoule 7y agoI can't get it why Bayer bought Monsanto when they saw this was coming...
- BiotechFuture 7y agoThey calculate risk / reward with models just like most acquisitions work. Honeywell bought a company back in my hometown once and took on their legal liability for environmental cleanup. Something like ~500M, they absorbed the legal ownership of whatever the company had, but their models say hey this is an overall net benefit of 600M - 500M we take on, hey we still make 100M lets do it!
- ragerino 7y agoThis all started happening after Bayer bought Monsanto.
- PaulHoule 7y agoFirst, talk about Roundup and cancer and endocrine disruption has been going on for 20 years. It's not just about Glyphosate but about the adjuvants that Monsanto adds. These make it work better against insects but might be more toxic than the active ingredient. Second, the lawsuits have been in the courts for a long time. Yes the big jury awards happened after the merger, but these were brewing long before that.
- TaylorGood 7y agoThe mass tort industry will have a field day with this.
- mr_toad 7y agoThey’ll have to be quick, a few more cases and there’ll be nothing left. Especially if the company is liquidated.
- blattimwind 7y agoIs it just me or did everyone say before the Bayer / Monsanto merger that it's a hugely bad idea and the joint company will have way more problems in court? Told you so. (Also seems to be the opinion of the majority of shareholders...)
- leereeves 7y agoThis is (part of) what the jury heard: The International Agency for Research on Cancer (part of the WHO) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015. After that, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (part of the CDC) announced a review of the herbicide, and the plaintiffs alleged that Monsanto conspired to conceal the risks by influencing or delaying that review. For example, a Monsanto scientist contacted a former EPA toxicologist: “We’re trying to do everything we can to keep from having a domestic IARC occur with this group. May need your help” And Monstanto's liason to the EPA wrote to another Monsanto toxicologist: “[EPA division director Jesudoss “Jess” Rowland] told me no coordination [between the EPA and the ATSDR] is going on and he wanted to establish some saying ‘If I can kill this I should get a medal’. However, don’t get your hopes up, I doubt EPA and Jess can kill this." https://www.courthousenews.com/roundup-cancer-trial-emails-show-monsanto-cozy-with-feds/ https://www.courthousenews.com/roundup-cancer-trial-emails-s...
- steve19 7y agoRadio waves (every frequency) are classified as “probably carcinogenic to humans” by the same organisation. (edit: its possibly not probably thanks to commenter below) This has lead to anti vaxxer types believing smart electricity meters are out to kill them (no idea why low powered smart meters are the devil over other emmiting devices). If you listen to International Agency for Research on Cancer every electronic device in your home, could kill you with cancer.
- will_brown 7y agoWell that’s why the defense cross examines the plaintiffs experts and calls their own expert witnesses. It probably sounded a lot worse when the roundup expert is getting crossed and has to admit to the amount they are getting paid to testify for roundup.
- leereeves 7y agoNo, the IARC classified radio waves as possibly carcinogenic, not probably. Furthermore, they said the evidence was "limited" for glioma caused by cell phone use (and thus the associated frequencies) and inadequate to draw conclusions for other types of cancers and other exposures. It was a very measured statement that's been misrepresented. https://www.iarc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E.pdf https://www.iarc.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E.pdf
- guelo 7y agoThis is the third jury that looked at all the available evidence and reached the same conclusion. That's 36 people that spent hours carefully looking at the available documents and u̶n̶a̶n̶i̶m̶o̶u̶s̶l̶y̶ agreed that Roundup can cause cancer and that Monsanto covered up the risks. Maybe we shouldn't be so dismissive?
- mzs 7y agoThis is a civil case so does not need to be unanimous: >Only one juror did not believe Roundup harmed Alberta but he was in agreement with fellow jurors on negligence and failure to warn. >Three jurors disagreed with the amount of punitive awarded. https://twitter.com/MariaDinzeo/status/1128044694582095873 https://twitter.com/MariaDinzeo/status/1128044694582095873
- staticautomatic 7y agoClarification: It technically didn't need to be unanimous because it had 12 people. Civil juries in California have to be unanimous if they're smaller than a certain size. Civil juries in some other states do have to be unanimous.
- Aeolun 7y agoHonestly, after all the stories I’ve heard of US juries everyone is right to be dismissive. I very much doubt all of them spent hours carefully looking at documents, much less understanding them. It’s not necessarily that I disagree with the verdict, but I strongly dislike jury justice.
- nearbuy 7y agoHow do you square this with all the major regulatory organization's experts concluding that there is no evidence glyphosate poses a cancer risk to humans? Organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization, European Commission, Canadian Pest Management Regulatory Agency, Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority and the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment have concluded that there is no evidence that glyphosate poses a carcinogenic or genotoxic risk to humans. The EPA has classified glyphosate as "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans." One international scientific organization, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), affiliated with the WHO, has made claims of carcinogenicity in research reviews; in 2015 the IARC declared glyphosate "probably carcinogenic." [1] [The IARC] dismissed and edited findings from a draft of its review of the weedkiller glyphosate that were at odds with its final conclusion that the chemical probably causes cancer. Reuters found 10 significant changes that were made between the draft chapter on animal studies and the published version of IARC’s glyphosate assessment. In each case, a negative conclusion about glyphosate leading to tumors was either deleted or replaced with a neutral or positive one. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate#Cancer [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-who-iarc-glyphosate-specialreport/in-glyphosate-review-who-cancer-agency-edited-out-non-carcinogenic-findings-idUSKBN1CO251 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-who-iarc-glyphosate-speci...
- writimov 7y agoWhat does this do to the company's financial future? If there are thousands more of these lawsuits coming and the legal precedent has been set, and this one verdict took 40% of Bayer's cash position away, how can they survive the next 12 months? Are they bankrupt already if even 10% of these lawsuits go through with the same verdict? https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/BAYRY/balance-sheet#figure_type=quarterly https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/BAYRY/balance-sheet#figure_t... Even if the verdict is slashed to 1/10th $100mil and they win 90% of their lawsuits, they will still lose 1,000. That's 1k X $100mil = $100bil in losses. Even cutting this by 50% they are still out of business.
- staticautomatic 7y agoThe punitive damage awards will be reduced to no more than about 10X the compensatory damage awards, so the math shouldn't be done using the actual verdict size.
- writimov 7y agoI thought I took that into account: the compensatory damages were $55mil. One thousand lawsuits lost (assuming 90% victory rate and 10k original lawsuits) times $55mil ea is $55billion in losses. With their current debt and income, they seem to be out of business.
- sjg007 7y agoBoth of them got non Hodgkin lymphoma.. clearly they were exposed to something..
- cjensen 7y agoThat's not how statistics work. Perhaps you were making a joke?
- fopen64 7y agoBetter write addictive apps than manufacturing something useful. Less risk of being sued!
- anm89 7y agoHow is there still a massive display of this stuff when I walk into home depot when it is widely acknowledged to be so harmful?
- pnw_hazor 7y agoIt is not harmful.
- esaym 7y agoIt has been sprayed over entire villages in South America to kill all cocaine plants in the area for decades. I'm not aware of any higher cancer rates of these villagers vs the regular populous. I'm not actually sure where all the hysteria over this product is coming from really.
- puranjay 7y agoI don't know about South America, but in most parts of Asia, the data is unreliable because a) poor rural people don't always get treatment, and even when they do, the diagnostics aren't always correct or even reported, and b) data collection is poor in rural areas - both the quality and quantity. So I'd take any statistical claim with a grain of salt.
- tomohawk 7y agoThere goes another useful product, victim of the court lottery. I was wondering why I was hearing all of these ads today from lawyers saying that if you're a roundup user to contact them. The gold rush is on. We so badly need the English Rule.
- webninja 7y agoMonsanto just needed to go out of business, even if it’s renamed to Bayer. They’re one of the most evil companies in US history. They jury voted this way simply because Monsanto is an evil company.
- mythrwy 7y agoProbably glyphosate isn't really carcinogenic. It's a substituted amino acid and lots of studies have shown it to be benign. But maybe it is. Maybe there is something we didn't know. Maybe Monstanto pumped out a bunch of fake studies. Probably not but this could be. Something to consider is this. The cheapness of our food production, which is not just the US but much of the world at the moment is in part to use of glyphosate aka "roundup ready" base crops like corn and soybeans. This allows higher yields with less cultivation. Now maybe this is all wrong and we should do it differently, but at the moment that is how it is. These "base" products trickle up into all sorts of things like meat, sodas, beer, who knows what else. And internationally. If glyphosate is not carcinogenic and this case is about lawyers and sensationalists and non scientific people out to stop "chemicals" or make a fast buck and in so doing raise global food prices it would be very egregious. Because it won't just be Wheaties in California that go up in price, it will be tortillas in Honduras and flatbread in Algeria and who knows what else. In those places, unlike the US, a non insignificant portion of income is spent on food so the pain will be greater. I'm not suggesting if a chemical is shown to be harmful it should be allowed. But there are ramifications of short term greed and non scientific thinking beyond the immediate.
- ragerino 7y agoI think we did know all of those things, but Monsanto was very well connected to the political establishment. Is it so difficult to accept the fact that this whole thing screams "corruption on the highest levels"? If I remember correctly, Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Family were heavily involved with Monsanto.
- zavi 7y agoHackerNews: American-owned company collects logs when you use their free website - pure evil that needs to be banished; due process is not necessary. European-owned company gives people literal cancer - system is totally rigged and unjust. More evidence needed.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't take threads further into flamewar, let alone nationalistic flamewar. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19904445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19904445 and marked it off-topic.
- wcchandler 7y agoStephanie Seneff has some interesting things to say about glyphosate. https://youtu.be/mX5OiRRNRnU https://youtu.be/mX5OiRRNRnU
- selimthegrim 7y agoSeneff’s credibility in this matter is questionable.
- burtonator 7y agoI love this guy on Roundup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKw6YjqSfM ... says it's so safe he'll drink a pint of it. Then the interviewer says "ok, well we have a pint, would you like to drink it? "
- klmr 7y agoThat guy is a twat but the safety of something isn’t determined by whether you can safely drink a pint of it, unless, well, it’s a drink. You also can’t safely eat a pound of salt (it’s much more harmful than drinking a pint of Roundup), yet salting your food in moderation is safe, and no jury will award you punitive damages against McDonald’s for salting their fries (even though McDonald’s is known to use excessive, and harmful, quantities of salt).
- jostmey 7y agoROUNDUP MAY BE CARCINOGENIC, GLYPHOSATES ARE SAFE, AND MONSANTO IS AT FAULT Having skimmed some publications, that is my best conclusion. Like all active ingredients, glyphosate was thoroughly tested for safety. Then to boost the efficiency, questionable "inactive" ingredients were added that enhance glyphosates getting into cells. "Inactive" ingredients are largely unregulated, and were probably not tested for safety. Why regulators allowed these additives to be labelled inactive ingredients is anyone's guess. If my understanding is correct, it is a sad state of affairs. Here, we have this wonderful herbicide, but its name has been shattered because Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) starting mixing glyphosates with unsafe ingredients. It doesn't help that Europe's IARC is classifying everything as possibly carcinogenic (including radio waves) because one or a few unsubstantiated studies claim it cause tumors in mice (or whatever). The IARC (in my opinion) is doing a disservice by distracting the public from more likely causes of cancer.
- ragerino 7y agoThis whole thing stinks. It's hard to imagine, that those issues did not exist before Monsanto was acquired by Bayer.
- wmblaettler 7y agoSomething I have yet to find is how much these people have been exposed to the chemical. Are they farmers that are spraying it in large quantities throughout the season or just regular folks at home spraying a little here and there on a weed? The difference is 100's of gallons vs less than 1 gallon. Also, are they then handling, processing and possibly eating food crops that have been previously doused with it? Sort of critical information to make educated choices on what's a "safe" amount vs "risky" amount.